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MOST of the world's population will be wiped out if political leaders fail to agree a method of stopping current rates of global warming, one of the UK's most senior climate scientists has warned.

Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change, believes only around 10 per cent of the planet's population – around half a billion people – will survive if global temperatures rise by 4C.

Anderson's warning comes just eight days before global leaders meet in Copenhagen for the most crucial talks on climate change reversal since the Rio summit in 1992. Current Met Office projections reveal that the lack of action in the intervening 17 years – in which emissions of climate changing gases such as carbon dioxide have soared – has set the world on a path towards potential 4C rises as early as 2060, and 6C rises by the end of the century.

Anderson, who advises the government on climate change, said the consequences were "terrifying".

"For humanity it's a matter of life or death," he said. "We will not make all human beings extinct as a few people with the right sort of resources may put themselves in the right parts of the world and survive.

"But I think it's extremely unlikely that we wouldn't have mass death at 4C. If you have got a population of nine billion by 2050 and you hit 4C, 5C or 6C, you might have half a billion people surviving."

I really think we should be concentrating our efforts on the emerging threat of Global Cow Flatulence. I realize this calamity has taken a back seat to O Blah Blah's gas, but we need to get ahead of this before it's too late.

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.C. S. LewisDo not ever say that the desire to "do good" by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives. (Are you listening Barry)?:mad:Ayn Rand

As states negotiate Kyoto's successor, simulations show catastrophe just years away

The world's best efforts at combating climate change are likely to offer no more than a 50-50 chance of keeping temperature rises below the threshold of disaster, according to research from the UK Met Office.

The key aim of holding the expected increase to 2C, beyond which damage to the natural world and to human society is likely to be catastrophic, is far from assured, the research suggests, even if all countries engage forthwith in a radical and enormous crash programme to slash greenhouse gas emissions – something which itself is by no means guaranteed.

The chilling forecast from the supercomputer climate model of the Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research will provide a sobering wake-up call for governments around the world, who will begin formally negotiating three weeks today the new international treaty on tackling global warming, which is due to be signed in Copenhagen in December.

The treaty, which is due to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, is widely seen as the Last Chance Saloon for the community of nations to take effective action against the greatest threat the world has ever faced. But the Met Office's new prediction hits directly at the principle guiding all those hoping for an effective agreement, with the European Union in the lead: that of stopping the warming at two degrees Centigrade above the "pre-industrial" level (the level of average world temperature pertaining two hundred years ago).

Today, world average temperatures stand at about 0.75C above the pre-industrial, and many scientists and politicians agree that further increases have to be stopped at 2C if catastrophic impacts from the warming are to be avoided, ranging from widespread agricultural failure and worldwide sea level rise, to countless species extinctions and irreversible melting of the world's great ice sheets.

But the Hadley Centre's simulation indicates that even if global emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas causing the warming, were to be slashed at a very high rate the chances of holding the rise at the C threshold are no better than even. The scenario, prepared for Britain's Climate Change Committee, the body recommending the UK's future carbon "budgets", visualises world CO2 emissions peaking in 2015, and then falling at a top rate of 3 per cent a year, to reach emissions of 50 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050.

At the moment, global emissions are thought to be rising at nearly 3 per cent a year – so turning that into a 3 per cent annual cut would be a gigantic slashing of what the earth's factories and motor vehicles are pumping into the atmosphere. There is as yet nothing remotely like that on the table for potential agreement in Copenhagen, and if a deal of this ambition were to be done, it would be regarded as a triumph.

This article would be hilarious if it was'nt so sad. The models used cannot simulate the current weather properly, yet alone 100 years in the future.

Why is the planet's temperature about the same as 29 years ago, when satelite measurements began?

Meanwhile, the sun, the real source of planetary heat, shows no sign of breaking out of its current lethergy. Last time it behaved like this, serious cooling was observed. Of course, those womderful computer models leave out any solar effects.
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surge in temperatures likely
[info]someofusknow wrote:

Clearly the irrational desire of ordinary citizens to continue to drive cars and take overseas holidays, coupled with governments' and bankers insistence on economic growth at any cost are on a collision course with several realities.

It will be interesting to follow oil prices over the next few months, now that peak oil is well past and fiat currencies are under such severe pressure: a rapid rise in energy prices would achieve far more, far faster, than any any theoretical carbon cut treaties or protocols.

The big question though is global dimming (which seems to be holding back global warming for the moment). The anticipated reduction in aircraft movements and reduction in industrial output could well result in a reduction in global dimming and a massive surge in temperatures in a very short time frame (a few months), especially in the Arctic, where temperatures are already significantly hgher than the long term average.

PS (I don't know which planet the people who think the Earth is cooling live on, but it is clearly not the same one as the rest of us, and must either be the planet Denial or the planet Uninformed, or as another contributor commented, some mindless computer that is sponsored by oil and coal corporations to generate spam at every opportunity).
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Alarmist claptrap.
[info]ptstroud wrote:

Another load of greenie alarmist claptrap. So the Hadley Centre's super computer has forecast this catastrophe using a climate model. Was it one of the Global Circulation Models that have forecast increasing temperatures with increasing carbon dioxide content? Well, perhaps Michael McCarthy has not bothered to read the results of global temperature measurements, including the Hadley Centre's own measurements, that show no warming whatsoever in the past decade in spite of a twenty five percent increase in carbon dioxide. In fact even the US NOAA a very warmist organisation has admitted this and have said that we may well be entering a twenty or thirty year cooling period.

The computer models rely on the assumption that the heating due to carbon dioxide precipitates positive feedback due to water vapour the most prevalent greenhouse gas. However, there is increasing evidence that the feedback is probably negative, or at least neutral. If this is so then there can be no catastrophic warming and cutting the emissions of this trace but life giving gas is a complete waste of time. This will be discussed in New York today and tomorrow when eight hundred climate scientists, economists and policy makers will attend the second International Conference on Climate Change. Funny though, the BBC has not publicised this important meeting, I wonder why?